from the building-on-sunflowers dept

Back in April, we wrote about massive protests that took place in Taiwan as a result of a lack of transparency during trade negotiations with mainland China. Those protests became part of what is now known as the Sunflower student movement, whose name refers to the use of sunflowers by the protesters as a symbol of hope. Techpresident has a fascinating article looking at the Taiwanese online community called g0v, which has been playing a key part in the Sunflower movement, and which is now trying to make government more open and accessible using open source tools:

g0v believes that current online participation tools like social media outlets and online message boards fell short in creating offline action or collaboration. g0v places itself at the center of open-sourced, hands-on, and public-spirited activism with a desire to engage citizens to create real social change.

g0v's work is proving that open-source communities can successfully open up and improve government. Ideologically, g0v does not believe that its activism needs to create an enemy out of government, but rather that everyone -- the government and the people -- wins when creative solutions improve existing public structures.

The post goes on to describe g0v's hackathons, its first conference, and the Open Political Donation Project. This brought together 9,000 volunteers to digitize 300,000 political donation records as a pointed response to Taiwan's old Campaign Donation Act of 2004, which allowed the public access to campaign donation documents, but only as a paper copy, or in person at a government office.

What's fascinating here is to see how the people involved in the Sunflower student movement have moved on from simply protesting against something -- Taiwan's secret trade negotiations with China -- to creating new tools to open up government and engage citizens. As the Techpresident piece concludes:

g0v's brand of activism is about making sure government does its job better. g0v explains on its website, it substituted the "o" in gov for a "0" to change the way we see government working. Through civic tech, hacktivism, and a belief that government can and should work, g0v is already showing that it can change the way that government sees itself and the way that people can interact with their government.

from the accessories-and-abettors dept

Techdirt has been reporting on the disturbing rise in the use of malware by governments around the world to spy on citizens. One name that keeps cropping up in this context is the FinFisher suite of spyware products from the British company Gamma. Its code was discovered masquerading as a Malay-language version of Mozilla Firefox, and is now at the center of a complaint filed in the UK:

Privacy International today has made a criminal complaint to the National Cyber Crime Unit of the National Crime Agency, urging the immediate investigation of the unlawful surveillance of three Bahraini activists living in the UK by Bahraini authorities using the intrusive malware FinFisher supplied by British company Gamma.

Here's why Privacy International is acting now:

While it's long been known that Gamma has provided surveillance capabilities to Bahrain, amongst other countries, the extent of Gamma's complicity in Bahrain's unlawful surveillance of individuals located abroad has only recently been confirmed. Two months ago, a number of internal Gamma documents were published revealing that Gamma is both aware of, and actively facilitating, the Bahraini regime's surveillance of targets located outside Bahrain through the provision of intrusion technology called FinFisher to the Bahraini authorities.

The analysis by Bahrain Watch clearly shows that, amongst the Gamma documents published online, those targeted by the Bahraini government with FinFisher technology were [the activists] Mohammed, Jaafar, and Saeed, along with prominent Bahraini opposition politicians, democracy activists and human rights lawyers.

Privacy International believes that this alleged surveillance of Bahraini activists while in the UK constitutes an unlawful interception of communications under the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 -- the infamous RIPA -- and further argues that Gamma is "liable as an accessory under the Accessories and Abettors Act 1861 and/or encouraged and assisted the offence under the Serious Crime Act 2007." If this reasoning is accepted, it could create an important precedent, at least in the UK.

Of course, remember that a bogus Polio vaccination campaign in Pakistan has resulted in people there no longer trusting such vaccinations and a rapid return of polio. While it's not likely that this campaign will directly lead to people totally ignoring HIV prevention advice, just the fact that the US government seems to be trying to make use of important health campaigns as part of a strategy to undermine others will have significant consequences, making people who need such information a lot less willing to actually pay attention to it. This doesn't seem like a good thing.

from the cited:-Piper,-'Rowdy'-R.,-1988 dept

At some point in time, the DHS and members of its Joint Terrorism Task Force must have viewed Joe Dante's John Carpenter's cult classic "They Live" and saw in it a blueprint for future actions. If you're not familiar with the premise, an average guy construction worker is given a pair of sunglasses that reveal the world for what it actually is -- controlled by aliens who pacify the populace by subliminally pushing them to obey, conform and consume.

Remember a few weeks back when we discussed the DHS Fusion Centers' use of powerful investigative tools like Twitter searches and The Google to investigate such harmful Occupy Wall Street-related activities like not participating in Black Friday sales or cutting up people's credit cards (at their request). Anti-consumerist is anti-government, apparently. It makes for a great conspiracy theory -- one that implies the government is actually run by corporations.

It doesn't seem to be much of a "theory," though. Given the number of active revolving doors that accomodate lobbyists, representatives and board members every time someone shouts "Change places!" there's little evidence out there to dispel this perception. The business of government is apparently business. The FBI worked with banks and Wall Street itself to ferret out certain Occupy protesters, going so far as to keep an assassination plot against Occupy leaders under wraps. The Fusion Centers' ability to treat nearly every submission with complete credulity has only added to the mismanaged mess, which resulted in the agency's underlings breathlessly exchanging Facebook links to planned disruptions like protests of irresponsible lending processes and the singing of Christmas carols at a "high-profile, undisclosed location."

But back to the conspiracy theory and "They Live." Does the government want you to obey and consume? Remember, George Bush said one of the best ways we could show the terrorists that the 9/11 attacks didn't destroy our spirit was to get out there and spend money. The government and businesses go hand-in-hand, and not simply in order to maintain mutually-beneficial relationships.

You may think: "wait--how is the 'Church of Stop Shopping' a national security threat?" There's an economic answer: namely, that any defense advantage the US has over other countries is epiphenomenal of taxation of a vast and growing national economy. Anti-consumerism undermines economic growth and, indirectly, military might.

There's a huge security state -- one that often operates in concert with the military-industrial complex -- that desires constant (and constantly increasing) funding. There has been nearly no effort made in the 12 years since the 9/11 attacks to scale back the reach of the DHS. The FBI's move towards counterterrorism (and away from law enforcement) has given it new revenue streams, one it's likely unwilling to give up. So, the government wants you to shop, because taxes fund operations that target people who tell citizens not to shop.

The connection isn't entirely sound. Federal taxes, not state sales taxes, fund the military. But the DHS and other government agencies need a steady stream of "threats" to justify budget increases and their continued existence.

Saying this sort of thing out loud is bound to make many people question your sanity. While there's no doubt the government views nearly any sort of protest with suspicion, it's tough to believe it actively promotes consumerist behavior with an eye on the bottom line of its favored agencies. Tin foil hats all around, or so it would appear, until you realize that a 30-page report tracking the Occupy Movement, which was passed along by DHS Fusion Centers as a warning about upcoming Black Friday protests, was authored by the International Council of Shopping Centers.

Who's answering to whom? The ICSC says, "Jump." The DHS says "how high?" and recommends everyone down the line do likewise.

Consume. Conform. OBEY.

The last part also fits into increasingly pervasive surveillance. Having "nothing to hide" simply isn't good enough any more. Any deviations from the expected can seem suspicious, especially when well-funded government entities are fishing around in their data streams for any signs of potential wrongdoing. Pasquale quotes a Kate Crawford essay on big data.

If we take [the] twinned anxieties — those of the surveillers and the surveilled — and push them to their natural extension, we reach an epistemological end point: on one hand, the fear that there can never be enough data, and on the other, the fear that one is standing out in the data. These fears reinforce each other in a feedback loop, becoming stronger with each turn of the ratchet. As people seek more ways to blend in — be it through normcore dressing or hardcore encryption — more intrusive data collection techniques are developed.

"Collect it all" meets "nothing to hide."

When people express their concerns with massive, unchecked surveillance, it isn't always about whether or not they've got "something to hide." Sometimes the real worry is that those caught in the web of untargeted surveillance have no idea what the fuck these agencies view as "suspicious." Efforts made to avoid "standing out" may just make someone look like they're trying too hard to "fit in." The standing assumption is that everyone has something to hide, even those who loudly state they don't and welcome the growth of the surveillance state. "Hiding" something may be an active effort. Or it may simply be a sin of omission. It all depends on the entity/person parsing the data.

Stray too far from the binary of Democratic & Republican politics, and you risk the watchlist. Protest shopping on Black Friday, and you risk the watchlist. Take a different route to work on a given day, and maybe that'll flag you ("what is she trying to avoid?"). Read the wrong blogs or tweets, and an algorithm like Squeaky Dolphin is keeping a record.

There probably isn't an overarching conspiracy guiding the government towards this end. More likely, it's the just the natural progression of the consolidation of two powers into a central location. Corporations and government entities are nearly inseparable. Both seem to have the same ends in mind, even if one relies on advertising and the other on control. Both dip into massive amounts of data and both watch carefully for patterns and anomalies. It's a natural synergy that feels eerily like constant pressure to conform, obey, consume. Both sides benefit heavily from orderly consumption and activities that neither rock the boat nor trouble the waves below it.

from the can't-take-the-heat dept

It's no secret that big companies, especially the giant multinationals, often have very advanced corporate espionage teams (sometimes staffed by former government spooks). The practices can sometimes be extreme and problematic, like when HP used its corporate espionage team to spy on board members and journalists. However, it seems that with the rise of consumer interest groups and very effective activists, many of these giant companies are using their corporate espionage team to spy on those non-profits and activists instead.

Many of the world’s largest corporations and their trade associations — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Walmart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald’s, Shell, BP, BAE, Sasol, Brown & Williamson and E.ON – have been linked to espionage or planned espionage against nonprofit organizations, activists and whistleblowers.

Many different types of nonprofit organizations have been targeted with corporate espionage, including environmental, anti-war, public interest, consumer, food safety, pesticide reform, nursing home reform, gun control, social justice, animal rights and arms control groups.

Corporations and their trade associations have been linked to a wide variety of espionage tactics against nonprofit organizations. The most prevalent tactic appears to be infiltration by posing a volunteer or journalist, to obtain information from a nonprofit. But corporations have been linked to many other human, physical and electronic espionage tactics against nonprofits. Many of these tactics are either highly unethical or illegal.

The full report includes plenty of examples, including the famous HBGary Federal/Hunton & Williams/Bank of America attempt to infiltrate Anonymous (and Wikileaks). It also includes stories about Stratfor, Monstanto and others. There was one example in there that I was unaware of, involving the giant pharmaceutical lobbying group PhRMA trying to spy on Jamie Love and Knowledge Ecology International. Love is a friend and KEI has done amazing work in informing the world about dangerous efforts by PhRMA and others to use international trade agreements to push through rules and laws that harm the public around both copyright and patent issues. So, perhaps it's not a surprise that they'd spy on him, but it's still quite troubling. The same report notes that a bunch of others, including Microsoft, hired another company closely associated with former IP czar Victoria Espinel to try to spy on Love and KEI:

Shortly after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Love says he received a visit in his
offices from a man who said he was recently let go from his job at Pharmaceutical Research
and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). “He said his job involved monitoring what I was
doing, every day.” Love said. “He told me that PhRMA had hired a private investigator to
investigate us, from the West Coast.” Separately, from 2007 to 2008, Love says that PhRMA
and some companies in the copyright sector funded efforts to investigate the sources of
funding for NGOs working on intellectual property issues, and to press those foundations to
end their support of consumer advocacy.

Around 2008 or 2009, General Electric, Microsoft, Pfizer and other firms funded an effort
by the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) to provide intelligence on NGOs working on
intellectual property issues. Love says, “They approached someone we knew, with a
proposal to provide information on Knowledge Ecology International and other NGOs
working on intellectual property issues, as part of a program to counter NGO advocacy
efforts on behalf of consumers.” Eventually, Love says, the NFTC contracted with the
Romulus Global Issues Management, an “international policy consultancy” that advises
“several members of the Fortune 100.” The managing partner of Romulus is John Stubbs,
whose wife is Victoria A. Espinel, a former Romulus employee. Espinel was U.S. Intellectual
Property Enforcement Coordinator (IP czar) for the Obama administration, and is currently
the CEO and President of the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

This is really playing dirty. While these companies may not appreciate what public interest groups like KEI do, digging into their activities and spying on them seems to go way beyond reasonable.

from the he's-so-effective-that-they'd-like-him-to-stop dept

Mother Jones has an interesting profile of Ryan Shapiro, a punk rocker turned animal rights activist turned MIT PhD student, who is officially the "most prolific" filer of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from the FBI. At a high point, he was filing an average of two per day. In fact, he filed so many FOIA requests so successfully, that the FBI is now refusing to respond and is giving the courts a secret explanation which they won't share.

The FBI claims that it cannot discuss the case in open court "without damaging the very national security law enforcement interests it is seeking to protect." Instead, it has filed a secret declaration outlining its case. "This is an especially circular and Kafkaesque line of argument," Shapiro counters. "The FBI considers it a national security threat to make public its reasoning for considering it a national security threat to use federal law to request information about the FBI's deeply problematic understanding of national security threats."

The FBI is basically arguing that because Shapiro is filing so many requests, he might actually be able to pull enough info together from so many different responses, that it would reveal stuff that wouldn't have been revealed if it had been found in a single FOIA request. In other words, Shapiro is better at this game than the FOIA censors, figuring out ways to get a variety of information that, when put together, is actually kind of useful.

Part of the trick, apparently, is getting a ton of people to agree to sign "privacy waivers" so he can request the FBI's info on those people, which the FBI wouldn't reveal otherwise.

When he started using privacy waivers, Shapiro realized he was on to something. Suppose you and I volunteered for the animal rights group PETA. If Shapiro requested all PETA-related FBI documents, he might get something back, but any references to us would be blacked out. If he requested documents related to us, he'd probably get nothing at all. But if he filed his PETA request along with privacy waivers signed by us, the FBI would be compelled to return all PETA documents that mention us—with the relevant details uncensored.

Shapiro began calling up old friends and asking for waivers. Coming of age amid the 1990s punk scene, he'd been drawn to animal rights causes and took part in their actions. He walked into foie gras facilities to film sick and injured ducks, several of which he rescued, and locked himself to the doors of fur salons. And while he no longer does such things, he has kept in touch with people who do.

Armed with signed privacy waivers, he sent out a few experimental requests—he calls them "submarine pings"—and when the FBI returned more than 100 pages on a close friend, he knew he'd struck gold. The response included pages of information that Shapiro had requested previously, but that the FBI had claimed didn't exist. Using case details from those documents and a handful of additional waivers, he filed a new set of requests.

Later in the article, Shapiro admits that as he got more and more responses, it certainly allowed him to fill in many blanks (and also point him to where to file other requests). This, it seems, is exactly what the FBI fears the most: Shapiro has outsmarted them. While, normally, FOIA responses are done in a manner to limit what information is shared and to never, ever suggest a slightly different query that might be useful, it appears Shapiro has more or less figured out a way around that, in part via bulk requests which lead down other paths of inquiry. No wonder the FBI has stopped responding. Shapiro just plays the game better than they do, and they're used to a world where the house always wins.

from the one-foot-in-own-mouth,-one-jackboot-on-everyone-else's-neck dept

Some of the most ardent defenders of our nation's Skynet surveillance programs and other forms of cyber-overreach have one thing in common: they continue to belittle their opponents as a loose confederation of basement-dwelling loners who exist solely on The Internet. I'm sure this form of disparagement plays well with like-minded people who take comfort in belittling things they don't understand (anyone more than 5 years younger than them; The Internet; bitcoin exchange rates; bronies*).

[*TBH, I don't really understand the last two either. But I have yet to attack them purely out of naivete.]

Mike Rogers, best friend to intelligence agencies everywhere, has done this on more than one occasion. The first one he fired off during his impassioned defense of the indefensible CISPA bill, in which he referred to opponents of the bill (including the ACLU and EFF) as "14-year-olds in their basement clicking around on the internet."

In his recent impassioned defense of not cutting off funding to some of the NSA's surveillance efforts, Rogers returned to his favorite target.

Are we so small that we can only look at our Facebook likes today in this Chamber? Or are we going to stand up and find out how many lives we can save?

"If and when our government grabs Edward Snowden, and brings him back here to the United States for trial, what does this group do?" said retired air force general Michael Hayden, who from 1999 to 2009 ran the NSA and then the CIA, referring to "nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years".

Setting aside the point that transparency groups like the ACLU and EFF aren't comprised of malicious hackers, the insinuation that the opposition is largely comprised of sexless young adults is nothing short of insulting. It's this sort of attitude fosters the "us vs. them" antagonism so prevalent in these agencies dealings with the public. The NSA (along with the FBI, DEA and CIA) continually declares the law is on its side and portrays its opponents as ridiculous dreamers who believe safety doesn't come with a price.

By characterizing the opposition as social misfits, the NSA's supporters hope to sway public opinion back to its side. After all, who would Joe Public find better company: anarchist twenty-somethings, most of them desperately single, or the intelligence community, which may occasionally, inadvertently overstep its bounds in its tireless quest to keep America safe?

Opposition properly belittled, Hayden went on to practically dare hackers to attack military sites -- and to equate their activities with terrorism.

"They may want to come after the US government, but frankly, you know, the dot-mil stuff is about the hardest target in the United States," Hayden said, using a shorthand for US military networks. "So if they can't create great harm to dot-mil, who are they going after? Who for them are the World Trade Centers? The World Trade Centers, as they were for al-Qaida..."

Hayden said that the loose coalition of hacker groups and activists were "less capable" of inflicting actual harm on either US networks or physical infrastructure, but they grow technologically more sophisticated. Echoing years of rhetoric that has described terrorists, Hayden added that their "demands may be unsatisfiable".

At this point, Hayden goes beyond insulting and into possibly dangerous territory by directly comparing "transparency groups" and "hackers" to al-Qaida terrorists. The best thing about this speech is knowing Hayden is still only a "former" head of the NSA. No doubt his words carry weight, but they're less likely to have a direct impact.

Reading Hayden's statements makes you wonder if those currently in the positions he formerly held also believe "transparency groups" and "activists" are "terrorists." Hayden attempted to portray his discussion of possible cyber-attacks as "purely speculative" but by couching it in "activists=terrorists" rhetoric, he simply exposed how intelligence agencies view those who actively oppose their tactics.

The War on Terror is ridiculous enough without the specious addition of opponents of domestic surveillance and supporters of Snowden's whistleblowing to the "enemies" list. Hayden's mindset indicates there's an underlying tension that encourages intelligence agencies to view millions of Americans as latent threats simply waiting for something to trigger their "terrorist" actions.

from the because-farmers dept

Over two years ago, we wrote about an absolutely insane proposal in Florida that sought to make it a felony to photograph farms without permission. The bill tried to position it as "protecting farm intellectual property," but everyone knew the real reason: farmers were upset about animal rights activists photographing and videotaping animal cruelty and revealing it to the world. We hadn't heard much more about that until just recently. A month and a half ago, On the Media had a segment about how these kinds of bills were showing up in more states, and now the NY Times has done a big article on how these "ag-gag" laws are being pushed by lobbyists heavily influenced by big farm groups.

It appears that the positioning of these bills has moved away from "protecting farmer IP" and over to claiming that animal rights activists are involved in terrorism for exposing animal cruelty. Now, we certainly believe that some animal rights groups go way overboard in their campaigns, though they often just make themselves look silly when they do so. But these laws just seem crazy, and a clear restriction on First Amendment rights.

But a dozen or so state legislatures have had a different reaction: They proposed or enacted bills that would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without disclosing ties to animal rights groups. They have also drafted measures to require such videos to be given to the authorities almost immediately, which activists say would thwart any meaningful undercover investigation of large factory farms.

ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), a group famous for writing legislation for members of Congress, has a "draft bill" along these lines, which argues that the effort is to prevent attempts to use images and video to "defame the facility or its owner." That's insulting. First off, we already have defamation laws. If farm owners are defamed, let them use those laws. Second, truth is an absolute defense to defamation, and if they're taking a picture that accurately represents what's going on, it's difficult to see how that could, in any way, be any form of defamation. Third, and most importantly, just because one might use some tactic to defame someone (even if it's highly unlikely) that's no excuse, at all, for seeking to ban the activity entirely.

In the end, it's legal efforts like this that make people especially cynical about the political process. It's pretty clear that there's no good reason for such laws. Rather, the entire purpose is to protect some farmers who don't want their practices exposed.

from the uh-that's-not-how-this-works dept

You may recall that, last fall, a Congressional investigation completely slammed Homeland Security's "Fusion Centers" -- noting that despite DHS insisting that they were critical to "fighting terrorism," the actual evidence showed that they had done nothing helpful in the fight against terrorism, but were instead chock full of wasteful (possibly fraudulent) spending... and with an added dose of civil liberties violations (just for fun).

Apparently, the Fusion Centers are trying to rehabilitate their own image, but they might want to send their officials to press training a bit more before sending them out into the wild. Reason alerts us to an interview that the director of the Arkansas State Fusion Center did with some local TV stations in which he appears to completely contradict himself -- first arguing that the Fusion Centers don't spy on Americans... and then saying they spy on "anti-government" Americans. First, there was this:

"There's misconceptions on what fusion centers are," he says. "The misconceptions are that we are conducting spying operations on US citizens, which is of course not the fact. That is absolutely not what we do."

Okay then. We've established won't you don't do. So, tell us, what do you do?

Davis says Arkansas hasn't collected much information about international plots, but they do focus on groups closer to home.

"We focus a little more on that, domestic terrorism and certain groups that are anti-government," he says. "We want to kind of take a look at that and receive that information."

Okay, hold on a second here. It would seem that his first statement is completely proven untrue by that second statement. Unless he's arguing that if someone classifies you as "anti-government" then you're no longer a US citizen, which would be a rather unique (and wrong) interpretation of the Constitution.

Elsewhere in the article, Davis defends what he does by playing the patriotism card, in which he can't actually explain what good he's doing, but just the fact that he's "doing something" after 9/11 is important.

"I do what I do because of what happened on 9/11," Davis says. "There's this urge and this feeling inside that you want to do something, and this is a perfect opportunity for me."

This line of argument is such ridiculously lazy and dangerous thinking. People who feel they need to "do something!" without caring as to what that something is or (more importantly) if it actually helps (or hurts) are not doing anyone any favors. They're just bound to cause more trouble.

European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes has invited Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a former Federal Minister of Defence, and of Economics and Technology, in Germany, to advise on how to provide ongoing support to Internet users, bloggers and cyber-activists living under authoritarian regimes. This appointment forms a key element of a new "No Disconnect Strategy" to uphold the EU's commitment to ensure human rights and fundamental freedoms are respected both online and off-line, and that internet and other information and communication technology (ICT) can remain a driver of political freedom, democratic development and economic growth.

Of course, that's rather rich coming from a region where France already allows disconnections as punishments (HADOPI), and where the UK has legislation in place that will allow it to do the same (Digital Economy Act). But it turns out that the ironies are even deeper.

The reason that Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg -- once seen as a likely successor to Germany's current Chancellor, Angela Merkel -- is no longer the Federal Minister of Defence, and of Economics and Technology, is that he resigned when it emerged that he had plagiarized significant parts of his doctorate.

After initial denials, Guttenberg was forced to admit the extent of his plagiarism thanks largely to a crowdsourced wiki called GutenPlag (original German) offering "collaborative documentation of plagiarism", which went through his thesis searching for passages taken from elsewhere without acknowledgement. In total, it claims to have found "1218 plagiarized fragments from 135 sources, on 371 out of 393 pages (94.4%), in 10421 plagiarized lines (63.8%)." There's even an interactive, color-coded visualization of what happened where.

Certainly, Guttenberg has been punished: as well as losing his position in the German government, he was also stripped of his doctorate. But his appointment as (unpaid) advisor to the "No Disconnect Strategy" raises a question. Is somebody whose downfall was mostly brought about by a website and its crowdsourced revelations really the right person to lead a project that aims to support online activists?

There is also the issue of Guttenberg's multiple copyright infringements. This was investigated with a view to charges being brought, but then, as Wikipedia explains:

In November 2011, the prosecution dropped the charges, having found 23 relevant copyright violations but only marginal economic damage. Guttenberg had to make a payment of 20,000 Euros to a charitable foundation, the court ruled.

In jurisdictions with extreme copyright laws, that "marginal economic damage" argument wouldn't be enough to protect those accused of infringement from prosecution or from being disconnected. So again the question has to be: is Guttenberg really going to understand what "No Disconnect" means to human rights activists living under authoritarian regimes when he got off so lightly himself?